This invention relates to the coding of video signals and more particularly to the coding of a video signal using adaptive sub-sampling to reduce the bandwidth/bit rate thereof.
The advent of high-definition television (HDTV) signals has led to a considerable amount of research into ways of reducing the bandwidth of such a transmitted HDTV signal without compromising the picture quality thereof unacceptably. In theory, it is possible to realise such a reduction in transmitted bandwidth by optimising the sampling rate according to the varying amounts of picture information present in a picture frame.